I have a cousin who is absolutely obsessed with John Mellencamp, to the point where she's gotten her teenage kids equally obsessed.  I can't imagine anything less cool for today's teenagers than being obsessed with John Mellencamp.  Okay, maybe like John Denver, but seriously.

Ooh, you've reminded me of my own horrifying story, though it did not occur at a friend's house, but rather my grandmother's house, where I was visiting one summer.  So, one night, the phone starts ringing, and when it became apparent that no one else was going to answer it, I got it.  It was for my grandmother, so I…

Pretty much.

I remember a weird conversation I had as a kid where someone was trying to insist to me that my family was rich.  I knew objectively that we weren't (we weren't—my stepfather was a doctor, so roughly upper middle class, but in a time when there was a lot less income inequality than now, so it didn't mean as much), but…

Yeah, but those are Anglican nuns, who barely count.

I'm just going to pretend that the school assigned lockers on a four year basis, so that freshmen were just assigned whatever lockers happened to be opened up by students graduating, and their neighbors would be random upperclassmen.  But, yeah, no school does that.

It makes a bit more sense in the context of the period.  It had been a few years since Roseanne went off the air, and there was basically nothing else on television that sought to represent working class life—and even Roseanne's family were well, well above Kim's on the socio-economic scale.  The late 90s—especially…

My strongest memory of going over to friends' houses is that they were almost always *weird* in some way.  Like, now, I seriously doubt I would think that, but that perfectly ordinary house a friend lived in 20 years ago?  Totally weird when viewed through the lens of a twelve year old.  Wait, why isn't the kitchen…

In retrospect, what's really jarring about it is that it never really goes anywhere after that.  Sure, I think there's the occasional reference to it in the next season, but you never get that "Mac finally sits down with her birth mother" or "Mac gets to take her genetic sister under her wing" moments.  It's just this…

Robo-Lincoln, Dinosaur Hunter

Not sure on whether he specifically said he wanted Burton to do it, but Dahl was definitely unhappy with "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory," mostly because he had wanted a different actor to play Wonka (but also some changes made from the original).  So I think there was an argument for doing a new adaptation of…

The look on her birth mom's face when she figured it out was just terrible, like she suddenly realized what her daughter could have been, but was instead saddled with that poor excuse for a human being…

Woot! The Weevil will be back!

Mac and Me?

When you're not the big name star, movies like that can't really touch you; they're just stuff on your resume that you presumably took because they offered you money.  If anything, it gets you more interviews because people want to ask you about how much of a clusterfuck it really was.  Now, if you're the star or…

Yeah, med school reunions have got to have the least variation in graduates. Sure, some will be hospital administrators, someone might be surgeon in the army, and the random guy here or there will have given up medicine entirely to paint in the south of France, but everyone else will just be bitching about health…

Conveniently, pretty much all of these comics are currently on sale at Comixology for 99 cents an issue.

I'm not sure you're really disagreeing.  The key point in the sentence was that *on television* everything is on the actor, because there was simply not the budget for special effects.  Maybe Christopher Reeve would still have been convincing without the top-of-the-line (for the late 70s) special effects, but they no…

Also probably influenced (directly and indirectly) by the Comics Code, especially in its early "we're really serious" years.  DC is sort of infamous for pushing the Code as a means to hamper its rivals without having too much of an effect on its own books, but the Code still had to have an effect on DC's writing…

Except it's all pretty much true.  Can you name another mainstream superhero team with as many strong, well-characterized women?  It's probably not how I would have written the paragraph, but there's nothing wrong with praising something that is praiseworthy while simultaneously demonstrating why the all-female team…